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A Girl’s Job is Not to be Noticed

High summer. Disappointed bees in the pantry, swifts tumbl…

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The Truth is Mostly Invented

They have laid me out on the table. The back of my head sits on a pad of cloth like an egg in a nest. Mister Lampard’s egg from his sailing days, big as my head, painted with negroes, that a whole grown henny could fit in. From an ostrich, which he told me was a bird a tall as a person with a bald pate and wings made out of hat feathers. He sold the egg when I was seven to buy Ma a new dress for holy days, saying she is a fine woman who deserves fine clothes. The dress was pretty enough, but she got blood on the back of it and didn’t say how, and though it laundered out mostly there remained a stain like the map of a far-away island. My head on the pad of cloth feels as hollow as that ostrich egg.

Pulled all the way up to my neck is a scratchy blanket. From the gin-sick smell of it, the blanket from Ma’s bed. I am listening with my eyes closed. I have surfaced from a ringing, thump-headed silence into scraps of talking that make no sense. Ma sobbing somewhere, and close to me, Mister Lampard’s voice, whispery. Neighbours, too, hushed as though talking in church when they shouldn’t. Sarah Foxwill and Sarah Moxy. Where are you? Arrested maybe, for clonking my father into the drink. Ma’s sobbing rises and falls like a November wind, and I don’t like that it stinks of something lost. The only words I can make out are Mister Lampard’s, because the Sarahs are practiced at talking under their breath, and the only sound they make is a soft sea-shushing. Mister Lampard’s whisper can no more hide itself than a cow can.

‘No,’ he is saying, ‘not that I know.’

‘The little one was out cold.’

‘Maybe. But it weighed anchor this morning.’

‘No, not a sign of him. Margret is fearing the worst.’

The words land on me like rain. Their cold meaning soaks into me. Moving makes my head punch itself from the inside. Your name comes out of me in a rush, with other words that unravel. Mister Lampard leaps to catch me — ‘Stop, little one!’ — and lays me back down, very gentle with my head in particular.

‘Shush now,’ he says, stroking my hair, ‘nothing to be vexing you,’ but his eyes say otherwise.

‘Mark,’ I say. Feeble as a snail.

‘Was Mark with you in the sail yard?’

The yes comes out of me like thin soup, no heft to it at all.

‘What happened?’

My thoughts crawl back. Ringing darkness. Before that? Splash in the water. Before that? You run across the stars with a giant hook in your hands. Before? Crack to the back of the head. Before? My father’s huge maw, grinning. My own eyes staring at me out of his face. My ankle tight in the manacle of his fist. And the two steps I took towards him. Had I stayed put —

I try to shake my head but even the smallest of side-to-side movements hurts like a fresh beating.

‘No?’ he says. ‘You can’t remember?’

And I so want that to be the truth. A person so stupid as to take those two steps towards a brute hanging for his life over the harbour wall deserves to have their head smashed open, and the brains spill out, and never to breathe again. But what has happened to you?

‘It’s all my fault!’

And Mister Lampard says, ‘No, Tyke, No, whatever you done, it was an accident.’

But now Ma comes roaring in, her face so close I can smell the drink in her.

‘Where’s Mark got to? What you done to my boy?’ Shaking my shoulders like I’m cream and she’s making butter. No word dares come out in the face of her fierceness. Which only makes her rage more, until I say,

‘Nothing! I done nothing!’

‘Nothing?’ she says. ‘You done something. It’s all your fault, you said, I heard you!’

Harder and harder, the shaking.

‘I done nothing!’

What you done to your brother?’ Her voice is a needle.

Then something happens in my head. One minute it’s so full of hurt I think it will explode like gorse pods. Next minute I can see her shaking that body on the table but I’m not inside it anymore. Her face, rosy as an apple, and that tight little mouth spitting words. When she says your name, I feel you on the other side of it, still attached to it, like an animal at the end of a long, long tether. You’re in the dark somewhere.

Ma is still blazing but Mister Lampard has her by her shoulders.

‘Leave it off, Margret, poor mite’s had such a knock, you’ll have no children left.’ He tears her off and lays me back down gently. She stands there, arms at her sides shaking uselessly with nothing to hold between them. When my body’s laid down he turns to her and she crumples to the floor, sobbing. If Mister Lampard didn’t stop her, I think she would have shaken me to death. When I fall back into my body, it has fallen, itself, into a long sleep.

When I wake again I am in my own bed. It is half dark, and I cannot tell if that means morning or night. There is talk downstairs, low and halting, and every now and then the sound of a spoon on a platter, which makes me think it must be supper-time - the end of the day, not the beginning. At first I don’t know why I’m in bed at supper-time, and think maybe we’ve been bad. I put my arm out to flop across your body to wake you and ask you. Cold blanket. Strange feeling in my head. Sore lump at the back of it. I remember.

When they know I’m awake, the questions begin. Mister Lampard in charge so Ma doesn’t get into a rage. He calls me to the downstairs room. Stands me in front of him. Ma holds herself at the door, looking out onto the street and vibrating. Very gently he says,

‘What was your fault, Tyke?’

I can’t say about our murder plan, following you down to the dockside, moving when I should have been still.

‘Being born!’ says our mother from the doorway,

‘What were you two doing?’ says Mister Lampard, ignoring her. ‘Why did you go out in the middle of the night?’

How can I say?

‘It was a game,’ I say.

‘What game?’ says Ma. ‘What game? What game?’

There’s no name for this game. Nothing comes. Mister Lampard tries again.

‘What happened to Mark?’

This is the question I want to ask them. If they’re asking me, then you’re lost. Mister Lampard, waiting for an answer, begins to blur.

‘I don’t know.’

‘That’s a lie!’ says Ma. ‘Look at those eyes.’

‘How did you hurt your head?’

Hand on my ankle, tug. The truth is impossible.

‘I fell over.’

‘Did Mark fall over?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Was anyone else there?’

My father hangs off the side of memory, eyes like my eyes, burning into me, telling me to tell the truth. I shake him off. Say, again, again, like another lump of moss on the path,

‘I don’t know.’

Mister Lampard turns to our mother and says,

‘Margret, we’re getting nowhere.’

Afterwards, she only wants rid of me. She doesn’t want to see me, she says, stay out of her way. Under the covers, the air grows hot. Tears run into my mouth. Later, I take myself down to the harbour. Stare at the fishing boats all tucked up for the day. Go along the side of the dyeing shed, scouting for clues. Nothing at all. No big hook. I stare down into the water for a long time, but its surface fidgets and the depth is stirred up like clouds. The rest of the harbour glints back at me with a sea kind of knowing.

The sea takes things away and brings things back, and sometimes what wasn’t there when you looked before floats in on a friendly tide, or the sunk thing fills with air and rises, or the drowned thing rafts, or the lost thing flops back onto the beach it was stolen from, days ago, weeks ago. Those next days and weeks, I walk along the foreshore looking for any little piece of you. But always there’s nothing, and I go back home through the alleys with my eyes on the ground, hoping no one will speak to me. Once or twice I look up by mistake and catch somebody startling when they see me, thinking I’m you. I never had a scrap of clothing that wasn’t yours. And I see their disappointment, too, when they see it’s only me. I wish I was you, too, so I wouldn’t have to look at Ma looking at me with that wish in her eyes.

Ma sleeps as much as she can. Every night someone from the village comes in to see how she is, and brings something for supper. They stay and talk to Mister Lampard. He is guarding Ma like a pie that needs cooling off, too hot to be cut up and served, though everyone wants a portion of her. I am always sent up right after we’ve eaten so they can speak their minds. I listen through the boards. Have I remembered? Am I maybe too scared to say? Sarah Foxwill says maybe you slipped into the harbour and drowned, but your body got tangled up in the rope when the Dutch ship weighed anchor. Got snagged and dragged out to sea. Will we have a service? Prayers have been said for two Sundays now but if the body has been dragged out to sea, never to return, then a service —

Dragged out to sea. Young men are snatched away to sea all the time in the big cities. When the Dutch ship sailed, might you have sailed with it? Taken by my father for punishment, or for revenge?

I ask Mister Lampard where it was going and he says the West or East Indies. He’s been to the East Indies. Furnace hot, he says. Months away. Markets full of foods that don’t look edible. Bright-coloured birds, reds, yellows and greens. I tell him I think you might have been taken onto the ship. My words vanish like the kind of snow that won’t settle. He puts his meaty hand on my shoulder and says,

‘We all want Mark to be alive, Tyke.’

Ma’s taken to her bed like crying’s a sickness. She’s sure you are drowned. I say nothing to her, for fear of her smacking me to Kingdom Come.

Then your shoe appears. Mercy Hindwish finds it, washed up on the beach, soggy, already growing green fronds like the fishing boats do. Ma knows, and I know, that it is your shoe, but neither will say so. Mister Lampard knows it is your shoe and your death becomes as real to him as the stone step at our door. The whole of Fishtown starts chattering. Where would the boy go with only one shoe? They are waiting for you to wash up on the shore any day now. Not knowing you’re on the way to a land where it’s summer forever and the birds are too bright to hide.

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Gin is Nobody’s Friend for Long

Bedtime comes fast when Ma hits the gin. Not for her sending us. We send ourselves. First thing, she gets friendly, all ‘cm-ere’, all ‘av-a-cuddle’. She wants to croon to us, especially the baby songs, the ones we don’t remember though she says they were our favourites. For maybe an hour she is the ma she might have been before she got hurt and hard from being, as she says, ‘the widow of a living man’. But even though gin opens her heart and makes her loving for a time, what else is stored behind that loving is not worth staying for, and we don’t tarry on her lap. We squirm off, and duck the loosely curling arm that tries to catch us as we pass, to clear the table and do our chores as fast as a couple of ants. You start the yawning, I catch it like the measles, and we find ten ways of saying how very tired we are before taking ourselves off to bed. Once she starts drinking, the past will come winding out of her, and before too long she’ll tip over the point where she loves her darlings and find the point where she hates our fathers: yours for going to sea, and mine for visiting land. And we are the only bits of them she can hit with her tongue or her clog.

We’re up in the rafters by the time the blazing starts and when splinters of the words come through the floorboards and spear me, you put your arms around me and say,

‘She don’t mean nothing. Don’t listen, Tyke.’

Then after a time she goes quiet, which is gin’s final blessing, the honey after the sting. You slide out of bed and stand there listening. Fully dressed, because you had no thought of going to sleep. The Dutch ship weighs anchor tomorrow, and you’ve a man to send to his judgement.

‘She’s snoring,’ you say. ‘Go to sleep, and I’ll see you in the morning.’

‘Wait,’ I say, and something sits me up like a jack-in-a-box. Even though I’m scared to see a murder, I’m more scared to wait for you, not knowing the where and the what and the how, and afraid you might not come back at all. Suddenly it seems worse to be left not knowing than to know more things than a child should see and know, even if that means I must help you to murder.

‘Well, hurry up and put your scrags on,’ you say. Who knows what time he’ll be too drunk to care?

A tiptoed creep across the parlour and a gentle click of the door and a run-and-duck through the streets and we’re crouched at the back door of the Blue Anchor. A man so tattooed he looks bruised stumbles out to the jakes, putting his hand out to the doorpost to steady himself. He turns to shout something to his friends, and though I don’t know the words, they sound like what you called Dutch. Still crouched, you peer round the door.

‘Is my father in there?’ ‘Must be,’ you say. ‘Though I can’t see him. You have a look.’

We change over. A fog of tobacco smoke. There are not enough stools and two men are leaning on the table. Another is sitting drunkenly in another man’s lap and they’re laughing like donkeys. One is on the floor, his two hands in prayer making a pillow for his head, eyes closed, peaceful as a babe. All of them at the table are a-ragging and a-roaring in their own language, the same as all seafaring men will do with a whole lot of rum inside them. Mister Lampard says they’re so used to being unsteady at sea they must make themselves unsteady on land too. Then I see him, the man said to be my father. Lifting a tankard, the forearm with its five-bar gate.

‘He’s in there,’ I say. ‘The one with his foot on the sleeping man.’

You check again.

‘Good,’ you say. You pull out the note tucked in your shirt, smooth out the creases. I already know what it says. You read it to me that afternoon. It says ‘I have been watching you from afar. Would you spend the night with a lonely young woman before you go to sea? Follow the boy, he will lead you to where I am waiting. Emerald.’

‘Who is Emerald?’ I asked and you said, ‘It is a whore’s name I think.’

You peer in again and I peer with you. John Crappin is standing by them now. He has brought them another large jug of ale, and two bottles of I know not what. He is collecting their coins. Silver is good, no matter whose head is on the shilling.

‘Now?’ I ask.

‘Not with John Crappin there. He mustn’t see me.’

So we wait and we wait, and duck out of the way behind barrels when anyone comes out to use the jakes. We are small enought to be hidden in the dark.

Then the moment comes and you are gone so quickly that it makes me jump when you are back again.

‘He has the note,’ you say. ‘Once we’re gone, follow after us. But don’t get too close. And don’t let anyone see you.’

You hop off down the path and wait there in the darkness. Just the line of your shoulders lit by the moon. I peer round the doorway. My father, and the man next to him, stare into the note like it is a well. Can they read? I remember your mime and wonder whether you did it already. My father screws up the note and bounces it off the head of the sleeping man. I look to you at the gate, but I know I shouldn’t raise my voice. So I tiptoe down the path and whisper,

‘He screwed it up and threw it on the floor.’

‘Blow!’ you say. You go back up the path, I follow like a lamb, and we both of us crouch back down by the barrels. But even as we stop there we can see the sleeping man, no longer asleep, has picked it up and is uncrumpling it. He starts reading aloud in broken English.

‘I have been watching you from afar.’

There is chuckling at the table. Some of them must know English. My father’s brow crunches. He doesn’t know why they are laughing. Someone tells him the joke he is missing. The woken man is laughing so much he can no longer speak and my father snatches the note out of his hand, half tearing it. Then, staring at it, he seems to remember he cannot read, and offers it back, prodding him to read more, and someone else to translate. When the woken man gets to ‘Emerald’, my father leaps out of his chair and bellows ‘Emerald! Emerald!’ and something I don’t understand but can guess means ‘I’m coming!’ because he is clutching his hand to his heart like it is so painfully full of love and that it might burst if he doesn’t contain it, and the whole table roars with laughter. Only then do we realise that he is about to burst out into the night, and you are not in your position by the gate.

We are saved by my father wheeling on his heel by the door to perform an elaborate and wobbly bow to his shipmates. By the time he has unfolded himself and turned himself in our direction you are once again a shadow standing at the gate. He locates you in the darkness, managing the English word ‘Boy?’ before stumbling past, blind to anything but the beacon that will lead him to a woman. His bulk blots you out of my sight for a moment. Then you are a shadow running down to the harbour, and he is stumbling after you.

I am a second shadow, flickering along behind the both of you. His journey is made difficult by the booze. As we approach the waterfront, he is laughing and calling for you to slow down, and the moonlight gleams wickedly on the sea. You’re heading for the yard where the sailcloth is boiled with tar, tallow and ochre until it is a baked crab red. Then winding along the narrow side of the shed. I’m only steps behind my father now. He is snorting through his nose like a bull. He shimmies the bulk of him down the same narrow passage by the side of the dyeing shed, the water twinkling below like a thing waiting to be fed. And as he rounds the corner of it, you do as you said you would: a rope secured to a mooring loop under the harbour wall pulls tight across his path at ankle height, and he trips.

But not quite into the water. With the instincts of a sailor whose body is practised at holding him out of the waves, he has grabbed hold of the rope.

The oaths that come out of him in a flurry of Dutch, I am glad not to know. His body, heavy from sinning and sodden with booze, is dangling over the water. Can he swim? He calls to you — ‘Boy! Boy!’ — and you step out from the darkness warily. ‘Boy!’ he says again. His hands grip the rope. He jerks his head to the side in a motion that asks you to come to his aid. Is he too drunk to know that the rope was pulled tight by your own hands? You stand unmoving.

‘Boy!’ he says, angrily now, and then something in Dutch that cannot be good, with a kick of the tongue and a dark trapdoor at the end of it. Perplexed, you glance at me, and his head swivels round. You have given me away. A grin spreads over his face like ants on bread.

‘Ha!’ he says. ‘Svay!’ And seeing confusion cloud my face, ‘Two!’ He turns his attention to me now, cranking his head to the side. ‘Come!’ he says thickly.

I hesitate. His eyes are twinkling like the water behind him, dark and mischievous. I have seen those eyes in the backs of spoons. Does he see this too, our family likeness? Is that why he is beckoning me towards him? The father who wishes to get a closer look at his child? His smile is unfathomable. I take two steps towards him and you shout ‘Stay where you are!’ but too late: a hand clamps round my ankle.

‘Run, Tyke!’ you say, and I try to pull away, but cannot free myself. You stare, wide-eyed. Now my father grins more fiercely. His eyes darken. He is stronger than he seemed, hanging on the rope with only one hand, and me with the other, but he cannot heft himself back onto solid ground without releasing me. I look into your face, and it is white as if it had seen Millicent Peeler’s ghost. But before I can so much as take another breath you have stepped back, vanishing into the darkness.

‘Mark!’ I cry, and your name echoes back off the cliffs. My father jerks my foot towards him and I crash onto my tailbone and then, as he jerks again, I’m flat bang on the back of my head — a flash of lightning, a sharp pain. I’m staring up the sky and the sky is staring back at me with its millions of eyes, and I can see deep, deep into that forest of nothing at all. Though he’s let go of my foot, though he’s grunting and hauling himself up, there is a buzzing in my ears, louder and louder, and I can’t lift my head, I can’t speak. You roar out of the darkness, blurring through my vision with a huge iron hook in your hands, and the last thing I hear is a splash.

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The Gift May Be the Wrapping

Saturday wakes me up with the sound of carts taking fish to market. Up past the Cowtown toll they meet other carts carrying all God’s living things, and dead ones too. Turkeys and chickens, turnips and onions, mackerels and cockles: anything you can kill and put in a pot is going off to get sold so that someone can eat it. I shove your shoulder a couple of times but you’re worn out from scouting so I’m first down to breakfast, except there isn’t any, because of Ma’s fright at the harbour. Ma sends me to Clowter’s for brisket. I hate John Clowter’s and she knows, but she never minds how I feel about anything. All those dead animal bodies hanging from Clowter’s ceiling, the rabbits stretched out like they were leaping away before they got bloody, the half pigs showing the side of their ribs no-one was meant to see, the chickens all naked and their white fishy eyes staring pure deadness, right into my heart like its own winter. I start upstairs to wake you, but she snatches my wrist, tells me to leave you sleeping.

There’s nothing for it but to clatter down the steps to the harbour. Grace Foxwill’s da is sitting on his steps mending a net and says, ‘Watch yer feet, Tyke,’ as I go by. There’s two more ships stocking up in the harbour beside my father’s, and some fishing boats too, and gulls are making a racket around somebody throwing out fish guts. I don’t look up at the deck of the Dutch ship. It’s moored there like a hill of trouble, but my eyes don’t need to climb it. I go past like I’m being whistled somewhere, half running.

John Clowter is blowing smoke outside his shop, with the big pipe he got from a whaler. For a minute I think this saves me from looking at all the dead things but the minute he sees me he says, ‘Ah, young Mark,’ knocks out his pipe and steps back into his shop, like I should follow. I don’t tell him he’s wrong on the name. I am wearing your last year’s breeches and maybe his eyes are not so good. And maybe wearing your name I can be braver, not shivered up my spine by the beasts and half-beasts dangling in the window. In he goes, and I go after.

There’s a shuffle at the back of the shop, and Peter Moxy vanishes like a wish. You remember one time we were playing Spit-Split with Peter in Tinkers Wood and he took an eyeball from his pocket and popped it into his mouth? Deep brown stare-ball in the centre of whiteness still carrying the fright of the cow that looked out of it when a man cut its throat. Peter kept his lips open for the eye to stare out. You ran away laughing, ran halfway along the path to Great Wishings, but I got stuck on the deadness of that great big eye staring out of Peter Moxy’s mouth. I stared down the hole of it and saw Peter Moxy himself, taller and thinner, laid out on a winding sheet, his face like chalk and his head cracked open.

‘Death’s coming for you too,’ I said. He stared at me, his face blown empty like a handful of flour in the wind. He spat the eye out on the ground.

‘Ma wants some brisket,’ I say, working hard not to meet the death stare of two hares that have twirled towards me, tied up like newlyweds.

‘That so?’ says John Clowter. ‘Your Ma happen to give you any money?’

I say nothing, because nothing is the answer, and those two naked bunnies are closer to each other than Jesus to his own cross.

‘On the slate is it?’

I nod, trying to place my eyes in safety, but there’s death hanging behind him, death twizzling in the window, death in the back room where Peter Moxy rinses pig guts for sausages and drops entrails onto pink sawdust.

John Clowter sighs, hefts a part-carcass onto his board and picks up a cleaver. He doesn’t bring the blade down. He just holds it, slicing sunlight into my eye as accidentally as his apprentice, in a few weeks, will hack off the end of his finger.

‘Your Ma’s a fine woman. Tell her I want to see her, won’t you? This will be the last bit of brisket, or anything else, until I see her.’

Nod. Down comes the cleaver.

Making my way home I get another fright, almost as bad as that pair of bald bunnies dancing in the window. Sitting on a mooring post, reading a book, is Reverend Ashburner. He’s not speaking a word, but his voice sounds in my head like the church bell. ‘Thou shalt not kill,’ he intones, though he hasn’t so much as snuck a glimpse at me, and his lips are pursed together like a oyster’s. ‘Honour thy father and mother.’

I stop like a steer snagged in a halter. A queasy feeling rising. We’d be breaking two commandments at once. He feels me there and his big cow head starts moving around to speak at me, but I pick up my knees and start running, fast as I can, running up the long steps, leaping over the half-mended net and the legs of Mister Foxwill — ‘Tyke!’ — all the way home. You’re at the door waiting for me. You catch me by my shoulders, turn me around and put my back against the wall, though I’m breathing so hard I have to bend double for a bit.

‘Best not,’ you say.

‘But the meat —’

‘She’s blazing. Listen.’

Through the door I can hear Ma arguing with someone, telling them they’re no good, a stupid dummon, a dawcake. And then the person she’s shouting at shouts back, and it’s Ma again.

‘You’ll catch the back of her hand,’ you say. ‘Or worse.’ You touch your hand against your ear, split at the top by a nail in a shoe, when you told her the truth one time. ‘Best wait till she’s done,’ you say. ‘Come on.’

You snag my fingers and we’re off up the hill, past the last of Fishtown’s doors and into the meadows. We’d stop at Guzzle Down but Old Peaty is there talking to the cows so we go further up to Great Wishings, where the witch elms take the meadow under their skirts and the sun isn’t so fearsome. I’m out of breath, not so much because of the hill or the distance, but the scare of the near-smack, which sticks in my windpipe like a fishbone.

‘Let’s sit,’ you say, and we slide our backs down the trunk of the middle elm.

‘What did Clowter give you today, then?’

You don’t mean the brisket. John Clowter wraps his joints and sausages in old broadsides. You unroll the outer layer, leaving the brisket in its pinkish inner layer on the grass, and start trying to make out the words. Mister Lampard’s been schooling you. He says boys go further if they can read themselves out of trouble. After wrestling broke him, he took the King’s sixpence in Plymouth. While he was at sea, he met a schoolmaster who’d been pressed into service to get out of debtor’s prison and that man taught him his letters. The navy was worse than slavery, Mister Lampard said, and he never would have joined if he could read. So he’s saving you from slavery with the alphabet. And now you’re hungry for scrawl and type, and the meat wrappers with their old news.

‘Hey, it’s a hanging one, and there’s a ballad! To the tune of Digby’s Farewell, it says.’

‘Who’s hanged?’ I say. ‘What did he do?’

‘Not he! A woman! A woman!’ More excited to think of someone getting hoisted out of her skirts — just for the difference — you read jerkily: ‘The Trial and Execution of Mary Caistor, Who Suffered Death This Morning at the County Jail, Horsemonger Lane, Southwark, for the murder of her husband. Shall I sing the ballad?’

Most often I say yes to your singing, but today there’s a chill in me at the thought of it and I put my hand on your arm and pull it down so the broadside lowers out of your eye line and the only thing you can read is my face.

‘What’s the matter, Tyke?’

‘It’s a sin,’ I say. ‘It’s against two commandments. Thou shalt not kill is one, and honour thy father and mother the other. The man is my father whether he meant to be or not, and we will be sinning whether we’re caught or not, and if we’re caught we’ll be hanged, and if we’re hanged we’ll go to Hell.’

You laugh. You say, ‘None of that will happen.’

But I keep my eyes on yours the way a dog looks at a man’s dinner.

‘All right,’ you say. ‘You’re scared. You don’t have to do it. I’ll do it alone.’

‘But then you’ll sin and get caught and hanged and go to Hell, and if that happens —‘

I am already crying just from making that happen in my head.

‘Shush now, I won’t be caught.’

‘And then you’ll be in a ballad, but I’ll not be able to read it.’

‘They’ll never make a ballad out of me. Not a hanging ballad, anyway.’

I grip onto you very tightly, like you’re already dead. I cry the tears that will wake you up again, like a fairy story. You laugh and shuck me off.

‘Get away with you!’

You put the broadside down and an arm around me. You take me through it: the rope pulled taut by the harbour wall, a sploosh in the dark, and another drunken sailor drowns a few feet from land, like three others already that I can remember. For having the cast of an accident I like the plan well enough, but I don’t know how you’ll get my father on his own, when sailors go around so much together, especially when they are swaying drunk and singing their way home.

‘He likes a woman, don’t he?’ you say. ‘Likes to get a woman alone and knock her lights out and put a baby in her? When he’s properly in his cups, I’ll get a note to him that there’s a woman wants to see him.’

‘Does he know English?’

‘I’ll show him,’ you say, and you strip your arm out from me to show me the mime, which needs both hands.

‘Looks like you’re selling apples.’

‘Shut your tatie trap!’

You leap up to do it better, swinging hips side to side too, and I suppose it wouldn’t take too much thinking to make your mime into a woman.

‘What about the commandments?’

You slide your back down onto the tree trunk again, right next to me.

‘It’s still sinning,’ I say, ‘even if you don’t get caught.’

You put your head against the tree and your knee starts jiggling. You say,

‘Don’t our soldiers kill every day in the name of the king? Are they told they are sinners and will go to Hell? No, they’re given eight ounces of dried beef and a pound loaf and quart of beer daily, a blanket for their beds and the king’s face in their purses.’

‘But they kill our enemies.’

‘Where in the Bible does it say “Thou shalt not kill, except if they’re your enemies”? Who decides who are the friends and who are the enemies? Not long ago, Mister Lampard says, we were killing the Dutch. The Dutch were the enemy. Now we have a Dutch king and fight shoulder to shoulder with the butter-bags.’

I take a big breath, wanting to speak, but the words don’t come straight away. There’s a wind stirring the tree above us. You start up again.

‘The way they give us these rules, and say they are God’s rules, but go by whatever rules they like, I say this is all stories, all nonsense, to keep us in our place and them in theirs. Lady Upton travels all ways and none in her coach and horses. But Peter Moxy’s feet grew out of his one pair of shoes when he was ten and he had no more until he was twelve and Mister Clowter give him some so he don’t have to stand in pig guts. Lady Upton gets a tenth of all the harvest for doing nothing at all, and old Albert Downey, who fought for King and country as boy and man, laboured in the fields until he dropped dead in a hedge. Reverend Ashburner schools us against sin before tucking into his roasted fowl every Sunday, but Millicent Peeler, thin as a willow, gets hanged for a stolen henny.’

Millicent Peeler’s name is an oath between us. Her ghost has been seen six times on Marshy Lane, white as a winding sheet. Just the thought of her chills me, but you haven’t noticed. You’re rattling on.

‘It’s one rule for the rich and another for the poor. You know how the Uptons ended up with the fat house on the hill? How they come to own all the land around here so every farmer must lease it, and give Lady Upton a measure of their grain when harvest comes?’

I try to shake the ignorance out of my head.

‘They stole it from us. From us, Tyke. This land used to be common land, belonging to every one of us, and we were free, and then the Normans invaded and took it from us.’

‘The Uptons aren’t Norman.’

‘They all are. Mister Lampard says they Englished their names, so we would think they were the same as us, and forget about them stealing our land. Them that can remember die, and new ones are born who think that’s just how it is, as if it’s God’s own order and has always been that way. They get the priests to say that it’s God’s will, too.’

‘Is it not God’s will?’

‘“When Adam delved and Eve span, who was then the gentleman?” Mister Lampard’s been all over this world, by sail and shoe-leather. He says he don’t want me walking into it with my eyes closed like he did. He says we should know that even if we don’t have a pair of boots between us, that we’re as good a human as anyone we’re supposed to bow to.’

I pluck up a piece of grass so I’ve got somewhere to put my eyes that’s not your face. I strip that piece of grass down to its core, the part that’s white and you can crunch flat between your teeth.

‘That man dishonoured our mother. Did he not covet another man’s wife? Did he not mean to kill her with that clonk to the head? And don’t those who tell us to obey the commandments break them themselves?’

That little stem of grass can’t hold me safe from you any longer. I look into your face and it’s as fierce and bright as the sun itself, burning the truth into me: the truth about who we are, and what we could be. And like a spark leaping from a tinderbox onto a field of high August wheat, you set a blaze in me. A blaze that might burn down the whole field of my life.

Some of them have existed as men.

Infamous 18^th-century pirate Mary Read tells of her previous life as a soldier and wife in this powerful novel by the award-winning author of The Marlowe Papers.

Contents

Port Royal, Jamaica. 18 November 1720.

BOOK 1.

Broxholme, Devon. 1696-97.

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Chapter 1

The Reckon-Pence is Not Money

We are the Tadpole Kings of Guzzle Down, Rat Masters of the Pantry, Grand Under-Tablers of the Blue Anchor, and we are preparing for murder.

My father is rolling a barrel of salt-beef towards the loading area. We are making ourselves small behind Mister Lampard’s whelk stall. Mister Lampard is on the dockside letting shouts rain on his head. The shouting man — a captain from his hat — is so red he could burst into flames. He is my father’s captain. Though his words are loud they mean nothing to us.

‘Dutch,’ you whisper.

‘How can you tell?’

‘Look at his shoes.’

There is only one shoe I can see, perched on the rail of the ship like a leather bird. A leather bird with a stockinged leg growing out of it. To me it looks no different than the shoes English captains wear, but because you are a year older than me and many beatings wiser, I trust your eye and begin to see a certain Dutchness in the way the toe curls.

Mister Lampard is pointing at my father and saying something not very polite. I ask you what it means. You know everything, is what I think about you then. That is why I trust you when you say we will have to kill the man who has finished rolling the salt-beef barrel along the dockside: has turned it onto its end.

‘Couldn’t Mister Lampard kill him for us?’ I ask.

His belly hangs over his belt like two loaves-worth of dough, but Mister Lampard used to wrestle for money.

‘It’s not for Mister Lampard to take revenge for Ma,’ you say. ‘If he wasn’t clever about it, he would be hanged.’

‘Won’t we be hanged?’ A boy our age was hanged at the Heavitree gallows for setting fire to a hayrick.

‘We will be clever about it,’ you say. ‘We will make it an accident.’

This is how we will erase the fear on our mother’s face. This is how we will cancel the sin of my making. I always knew I was born out of sin, because sometimes drink would make Ma say so. But I never knew how until yesterday, when she came back from buying the leftover catch tearful, with an empty basket. She said nothing to us, but everything to Mister Lampard, which is the same as to us when we have our ears to the boards. Forced in a dark stairwell, she said. Mister Lampard said there there, not asking for details, but she told him anyway, though what she said wasn’t much: the smell of rum and a knock to the head.

‘How do you know it’s him?’ Mister Lampard asked.

‘The tally tattoo on his arm,’ she said.

That inky five-bar gate we catch a flash of as he stands there, wiping his brow. A tally of ladies knocked on the head, maybe.

‘Will we kill him now?’ I ask.

A laugh huffs from your nostrils.

‘That wouldn’t be clever.’

We watch the man waddle back onto the boat. He has the long-time sailors’ walk, side to side, as if he is still at sea. Mister Lampard stomps back towards us. The Dutch captain is still shouting, throwing his words to land like spit on Mister Lampard’s head. Mister Lampard says,

‘Miserable old ______!’

Whatever the last word means, I am eager to learn it. He follows up with a string of oaths. Then our ears fill with gull-caw and boat-creak, waves slapping the wooden jetty, because Mister Lampard’s got all his anger out.

Later, he’s having supper with us. Whelks in gravy, and the bread Ma baked yesterday, which sticks to the top part of my mouth like a lie. They are talking about reckon-pence. Which is money you pay someone to atone for a sin. Ma is crying.

‘My languages ain’t good enough, Margret,’ says Mister Lampard. ‘I told the Cap-n he should pay for the littlun. I say to him, your man, your man, but he thinks I mean him. So I point at the man who - forgive me, Margret, we all know what he done - and I do a mime.’

It’s true. We saw the mime. Mister Lampard standing on the dockside wobbling his tarriwags like a dog on the butcher’s leg. A laugh burst out of me, I couldn’t stop it, and you might have told me off except one burst out of you too. But then, because Mister Lampard’s mime wasn’t silly enough to stop it being wrong that a sailor hit Ma over the head to make a baby, and we were supposed to be hiding, you made your face serious and nodded at me to be cross again, so I was. Now I check across the table to see if you’re remembering the mime. But you’re scraping a piece of bread around your plate, pushing the gravy into the middle, which means you’re listening very hard and pretending not to. Mister Lampard has Ma’s hand and is filling her ears with words.

‘So I says, keep the blunderbuss on the ship. So he don’t go off on some other woman. But the Cap-n says “All men must drink.” That’s all he says, Margret. “All men must drink.”’

Ma’s tears are falling silently into her lap. She’s looking at her hand in Mister Lampard’s. A mouse in a trap. Curled up soft, like it’s dying in Mister Lampard’s big bed of a hand, his fingers closed over hers.

‘I did what I could,’ he says.

When you’ve mopped up all the gravy, and shoved me your last bit of bread beneath the table, Ma shoos us into the rafters. It’s hot, as if all Ma’s fuss has nested up there like a fluster of pigeons. The mattress feels extra itchy under my shoulder, like some of the straw is poking through but when I complain you say it’s my thoughts that are itchy. You always know my thoughts, as if we really were the twins that strangers take us to be.

‘Does he look like me?’ I say. ‘Do I look like him?’

‘Maybe when he was a scrap he looked like you.’

If he was ever a scrap, he was a bruising scrap, the kind who fights out of his swaddling and punches his Ma on the nose.

‘Do you look like your Da?’ I say, and then I’m sorry, because he’s been a long time at sea and we’re not supposed to talk about him.

‘Ma says so,’ you say with armour in your voice, and I’m doubly sorry. It’s so long since he last went to sea that all we have of him is his name, Read, which all of us wear like a brand of belonging, even if he’s shaken us off, or the sea has shaken him out of his skin. I’ve wondered whether he’s looking down on us all from sailor heaven, which Mister Lampard says is blue skies, a fair wind, and an ocean of rum. But the new story is gnawing at me like a crab on bacon rind.

‘Maybe he didn’t come back because he didn’t believe Ma about the stairwell and the knock on the head,’ I say. ‘He’s at sea, you say,’ in a flat voice that means Don’t you even think anything else.

For a while after that you don’t speak and I wonder if you’ve fallen asleep, though your breathing is noiseless. A shanty starts up in the tavern across the street. I wonder if Mister Lampard is leading it because it’s Maid of Amsterdam but that would be unkind to Ma and anyway I hear him grunting downstairs, like he’s lifting something heavy. More likely it’s down to the Dutch ship being in harbour. When the song gets to the bit where the Great Big Dutchman Rammed My Bow you say,

‘We can’t do anything about my dad, but we can do something about yours.’ You don’t need my nodding in the dark, which is only to soothe the prickly thoughts my head, like a kind of rocking. You are talking more to yourself than anything when you say, ‘I have a plan.’

Only half of me wants to hear this plan of yours. The other half wants to hide under the blanket and muffle you out. But you’re my brother, so I ask you,

‘What?’

There’s a big pause like you didn’t have a plan at all and are thinking it up right on the spot. There’s moonlight coming through the gap in the eaves and I can just see the edge of your face, drawn in silver. You eyes close, and open.

‘We will kill him when he’s drunk.’

You wait as if I am meant to ask how but I am worried about the ‘we’. I have never killed so much as a beetle. I don’t know how not to be part of your ‘we’ because we do mostly everything together, so I ask,

‘What about the reckon-pence?’

You sit up in the dark, like your hair was pulled. You say death is reckon-pence enough. You say everyone who dies gets their reckoning, because of Judgement Day, and best my father gets in line for his sooner before he knocks any more women over the head and makes babies on them. Your plan has made you all twitchy and now you’re out of bed and pulling on your breeches. It looks like I might be excused from your ‘we’ because you’re not asking me to get dressed as well, but I’m still worried about the money. Ma told Mister Lampard to get money off him, because it’s hard to feed two littluns on what she makes from sewing. I’m thinking if she only feeds one it won’t be the one whose father smacked her on the mazzard.

‘But the money,’ I say.

‘She won’t be afraid to walk around Fishtown.’ Tying the cord around your waist. ‘And that’s worth a few bob.’

So it’s decided. You, or maybe we, will kill my father when he’s drunk, and leave God to sort out the reckon-pence.

‘Where are you going?’

‘Scouting. You get some sleep.’

I lie awake for a long time waiting for you to come back but all I hear is mouse-scritch. Outside, the tavern roars and then quiets, roars and then quiets, in waves like the sea itself. In the quiet I hear, high on St Mary’s hill, the murdered-woman shriek of a fox. Voices leave the tavern in clusters of holler and laughter. The fox is done with its horror and quiet gets thick as soup. A lonely song wobbles itself up the street.

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Life Shows Up to Say Goodbye

The walk to the gallows is a feast of sensation. Nothing lets you know you’re alive like Death at your shoulder. Prodded up some badly-carpented steps, your wrists bound in sisal, your ankles hobbled with iron cuffs chained together, to a platform where your extinction twirls in the breeze in a loop ahead of you. On the fifth step, the protruding slant of a nailhead knocked in by some fellow not caring too much about the finish. Not caring too much about who’d be going up these steps and not coming down again. That slant nail groans through the grain of a tree chopped down and planked to bear your weight, its wood striped with every year it grew. A tree once slender as a finger. Its whole future contained in a seed you could put in your mouth and swallow.

Life shows up to say goodbye. Last taste! says the brain, that roguish companion who steered you into so many holes. Drink it in! says the old thinker. Meaning eyes and ears and nose and every hair on your body but what you have the most thirst for is air. You suck it deep into your lungs and despite the sun already fierce on your skin, the air comes in cool because the wind is running in strong from the sea. If your eyes are thirsty, nature rises up to satisfy them, willing as that sweet wench at the Fortune. Colours as vivid as they’ve ever been, any day of your life. Last moments! they shout. Nature puts on a show for those about to fertilise it, whether hung in cages over the water or dug into the ground. Nature gives thanks with yellows so yellow they punch you in the throat. Paragreets screeching laughter in the trees, green as limes. Hibiscus flowers red as a whore’s dress. The sky so blue and wide and empty it makes you want to weep for your mother, even if she never much loved you and often wished you unborn. The whole crowd gathered to watch you die ripples like a field of wheat. Behind them, bleached and clustering huts, and behind the huts, the sea shushing you with its ancient song. That old keeper of your history, laying itself over the beach again and again saying miss me, miss me.

The Governor comes out of the low white building where he has been putting on his braids and fakery — the costume required to kill with authority and without penalty.

‘Desperate men all!’ says a woman in the crowd. From what I saw in the wagon from Spanish Town, there’s little in anyone’s face to confirm her pronouncement. Featherstone looked as peaceable as if he were about to lay His Bonyness down to sleep for the night. Davies and Howl, who count laughter their chief rebellion, were grinning like children about to be caned. Absent in thought, Bonny’s head nodded with the ruts of the road like every bump was a yes. Squire Corner held a face as smooth as a lake, his thoughts invisible under the surface.

I could not look at Rackham.

Then we were bundled out and two uniformed men, who besides their uniforms seemed more roguish than any of us, prodded us into an order, wishing the least of us hanged first and the ones deemed the rascaliest rascals last, so that we might die from left to right, as though we are a sentence building to an exclamation mark. So much do they love hierarchy that they must write us into it even at death. So Davies and Howl were prodded up first to be hanged on the left as the crowd sees it, and then Bonny and myself as the fiercest fighters, and then Squire Corner, because he is Quartermaster, and His Bonyness, Featherstone, as Sailing Master, and finally Rackham, the captain who never set himself above any of us.

Gallows Point is a fine place to die, with the Fort that once surrounded it dropped into the sea by a quake many moons ago. Why hang men here, circled in the arms of the sea, and nature pushing up wild through the brick and stone? To show us what we are losing. To remind us what we will decorate when our bodies are caged and displayed, on the approach to Jamaica, until we are skeletons. Which in this rich rotting clime will not be long. The smallest injury will fester hard, as anyone knows.

Every inch of this life is a wonder. Not only the tigerish butterflies broader than your palm, or the flame-feathered birds, but the sand flies that seemingly pop in and out of existence and the small child emptying their bowels by the powder store. Goodness yes, human beings, with all their idiocy and brilliance, constructors and destroyers of the world, masters of engineering and victims of feeling. What perspective I am granted now, as I wait for my hanging. The world made suddenly vivid and jewel-like. Here is the treasure, in our hands all along, that never needed to be raided or robbed.

Is this why I change my mind?

Brother, I swear, I was ready to die. Was determined to go with my crew.

But the body has no desire to be quitted. Filled to overflowing with something whose word I hardly dare say, a word often used narrowly and often abused, so universally longed for, so seemingly hard to come upon, but right at my end it charges fiercely through my body: love. Unending and boundless love. For everything. For everyone. Even that ridiculous Governor climbing up to his separate podium to address the crowd. Love of this life, that is what changes me, riffling through my body. Every pipe and tube vigorous with fluids, wanting me to run, or wanting to run out of me. Every hair on my skin raised up like an army of soldiers stood to attention. There are words that would save my neck. And now it is everything I can do to hold on to them.

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